


with newly formed wings (percutiensque levem modo natis aera pennis)

by Dingelchen



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Wings, Body Modification, Multi, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Transformation, Wingfic, Wings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-03
Updated: 2016-06-03
Packaged: 2018-07-12 01:54:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7079866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dingelchen/pseuds/Dingelchen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stories of having six limbs, changes, and the people living with them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Caeneus

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt on the AvengerKink meme. Loosely inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses. Title and story names quote and refer to Ovid's _Metamorphoses_ , what with the prompteranon wanting transformations and all; some are more obvious than others, but I deliberately eschewed a few of the more common ones that would have come to mind.
> 
>  
> 
> **percutiensque levem modo natis aera pennis**  
>  _and beating the light air with newly-formed wings_
> 
>  
> 
> Warnings: Canon violence, traumatic bodily changes and possible accompanying body image issues.

He wakes up in a bed of broken concrete and glass and feathers. People are hurt.

But not him. Bruce's body is aching but unharmed by the destruction around, not a single scratch on him save for his wings, as naked as the rest of him. Shock molt, he thinks, distracted. They will grow their feathers back. They are irrelevant, because Betty is hurt.

After, he learns what happened, from blurry footage and terrified whispers. What he became, something large and green and angry, while his rational mind slept.

He only makes sure Betty will recover. Then he runs and never looks back.

He covers up his bare wings, to keep people from staring until time will have let feathers grow back. He cannot be noticed.

The feathers come back, but they are not his. They are grey, a sickly shade leeched of colour, the feathers thin, narrow and overgrown, hanging limp or curling out of place. Defect.

He'd been handsome before, well-plumed with good colours, feathers broad and rounded, brindled and thick, and as much as he would like to think it a blow to mere vanity, it hurts. Another part of his body lost to him and uncontrollably changed. A part of the monster, of its ugliness, reaching over into his waking body even while it sleeps.

He fears what it will do to his abilities to blend in, but he should not have worried.

Oh, people do notice. But they do not notice him. They stare at his wings, but not at Bruce himself. They look away entirely, in disgust or shame or trying not to offend. He is highly visible as a body, but invisible as a person.

So he keeps running and hiding. He starts looking for a cure for his other angry problem with the help of whatever resources or contacts he can.

Eventually he makes his way back home. But there they find him and the monster comes out again and.

Bruce wakes up in Betty's lap, out in the wilderness, shielded by her wings. He wants to hide there forever, but her voice is insistent, that he has to look. She picks up something and moves it gingerly, sure but cautious like she does volatile chemicals, and brings it before him. It's a feather, large, more so than he has ever seen anywhere, with a strong rachis and wide vanes. And green, electric and bright. It crumbles under his touch, dissolving into dust, fading into the air with a smell of ozone.

He laughs until he is crying, and Betty hold him while he sobs.


	2. Philomela

The Black Widow becomes whatever is needed of her, like all her sisters do. She adjusts her walk and never stumbles unless she does, sticks in a knife and turns gracefully and giggles and poisons a drink or an ear, goes en pointe with her wings swept above her, cygnet or queen, harmless or lethal. She puts red on her blades and on her lips, puts tan on her skin and platinum in her hair, dyes the vanes of her feathers, covers them in dirt or in glitter, breaks hearts and bones and minds with equal precision.

After, she returns to her keeper, himself old and owl-winged, and sheds the paints and changes the dyes and picks up the scissors and does it all over again.

She has been everything for so long she doesn't remember what she is like without it. If there was anything _her_ , to begin with. She wonders, and knows she is not supposed to wonder, for she is their creation, nor to ask, for her voice speaks only for them.

But the hourglass in her stomach has been leaking for a long time, as she hungers for something out of reach, and the red one's spells cannot keep her trapped forever.

Natasha flees once upon a night, in one of the dark hours when she feels most like what was left of herself, and doesn't return to the owlish man when the sun rises again.

Her prince is clothed in lilac plumes and black kevlar, follows the tale and doesn't shoot her when she reveals herself, ebony-framed face pale as befitting the princess but her wings still gleaming like dark cherries.

She follows him across the ocean and is offered a place as an agent with his blindsided employers, and she takes it, cautious but glad. She is able to be anything, and what they want her to be — spoken and unspoken — she can be so, so easily. Do better things, maybe, make up for what she did, was made to do but still did, before. She will be what they need for them, and carve out a place for herself alongside, a space where she can try to learn to exist, as and for herself, if such a thing is possible.

The early months she stays at SHIELD is the longest stretch of time she can remember with no orders or other pressing external needs to alter herself, and so she doesn't, feeling defiant. She touches no dyes, lets her hair grow out, fire from coal, red from the black of before, and waits for the cherry feathers to fall. She could buy the pills to induce an early molt, has taken them before, and so she doesn't.

So she waits, and wonders, half anxious. Appearances are deceiving and do not lay out a person's soul, this she knows and has intentionally used as a tool all her life, but still. She cannot remember being in her natural state, has never been in her adult life, the manipulating camouflage of dyes and bleach as much part of her craft as firearms or electronics.

After her pinions come in, unsmothered by bleach, showing clearly what has already been revealing itself in patches of her coverts, she cannot but feel the irony.

Her wings are white, pure and luminous. Odette's raiment covering Odile's falsehood.

As if the random fate of genetics were to mock her, try to make her a liar once more without her say, cover up the sins she cannot even think of how to erase.

But she has fought for this, to take back whatever is salvageable of who she might have been, of who she could be, and so she does not take up the arsenal that is cosmetics against herself again.

To mislead others; to please herself; but never to fight herself.

Being able to accept it takes time, but when the last bloody cherry drops have fallen from her wingarms it almost doesn't bother her anymore. Though their pureness of colour does make imperfections more visible, but she picks out dirt as diligently as the occasional purple down, so it matters little. If she saves them up sometimes instead of throwing them out, tiny lilac petals, it is no one's business but her own.

Years later an evil sorcerer puts an enchantment on Clint and he betrays them, betrays her, and though it fits the story she had long since stopped waiting for what seemed inevitable so long ago. Back then it wouldn't have hurt much, and now it doesn't either, because she knows Clint and trusts him as he does her, and she knows he did not leave but was taken, and she has to believe that this means she can bring him back. Magic spells are nothing she would ever have expected to actually happen, and neither are literal monsters. The tale sets her up to fail, but she has broken the narrative written for her and onto her before. When she receives his location, shaking, soft white curled around her in the red-tinted dark of the emergency lights, red like she had been when he had come for her, she stands up again and hunts him down, and drags him back kicking from the blue darkness Loki kept him in.

Voluntarily sharing what she has reclaimed of herself never becomes easy, but she does, sometimes, and whoever comes so close to her and is welcome will be protected.

Until her finger lies on the not so proverbial button to release everyone's true faces and deeds in the effort to end the entangled mess she had unknowingly thrown her lot in with, and they try to use that, use her in their attempt to stave it off. But she has promised herself that she will not be used again, and neither will she be held hostage against herself. They already were undermining the former without her realizing until almost too late; she will not give them the latter.

Knowledge is power, and she dealt in that most of her life, showing herself to people just in the right ways to let them believe whichever truths she chose to feed them. With the tables turned she has given away from that power, displaying herself and all the things she is still making up for, for others to make of that what they will.

For there are some who have looked at her veils of lies and truths and sins and unpaid debts, at them and through them, and still found something worthy, who looked past her plays to win them over and still chose to trust her with open eyes, and it makes her light and unafraid.

The cards are out of her hand now, shuffled in with the collapsed remains of SHIELD and HYDRA. She will stand before the world in her true colours, flame and snow about her shoulders, and the blood in her ledger for all to see.

Knowledge of oneself is fragile, that simple bitter truth she set out with, but she knows there are people who trust her now who will drag her back if she ever were to lose herself again. And right now Natasha Romanoff knows herself and can face that woman in the mirror, and everything more than that she still has time to find out, and every single of those truths counts more than any can know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for everything, my brain just does that all by itself. Like with the Swan Lake symbolism; Nat's wings just came out as white and then there was Odette because Russian ballerina, then my brain was hey, that kinda fits with the owlish _Red_ beard holding the girls captive and the saviour first coming in to shoot her, haha, and then the prince betrays her due to enchantment— _fuck_ ow. So yeah. I hope the prose doesn't get as purple as Clint's happy wings. Nat's hair colour upon defection harkens back to her dark hair of the early comics.


End file.
